Letters to the Editor: Workforce Housing 03.31.16

Separate and Unequal

East Hampton

March 27, 2016

Dear David:

I noted with interest your front-page article about building a 40-unit affordable housing complex in the hamlet of Amagansett. As I progressed through the story, I was a bit shocked by such a negative reaction from some of the attendees to the statements being made by the highly paid consultant. Basically, the consultant was trying to scare everyone with a worst case scenario of 72 children invading their local school. Well, all I can say is: Welcome to the world of the Springs taxpayer! This type of huge student influx has been going on here for years and apparently no one cares. However, now that such an event might directly affect them, perhaps our fellow citizens can see the problem better.

That Amagansett audience found out how it feels to be taken advantage of by a biased and exclusionary six-hamlet school system. Separate school districts that were deliberately created to provide a dumping ground for new residents, while protecting the pre-existing landed few.

An influx of new students always follows parents who must go where the best (read: most affordable) residency is obtainable, whether it be by rental or purchase. By the town upzoning some hamlets to two or five acres for new construction, it has automatically forced the working class, i.e., lower-income people, to gravitate to a hamlet, like Springs, that allows smaller plots of land to be built on or developed. This quickly leads to the school in that poorer area busting at its seams while the other schools in the distant richer school districts get to remain small, quaint, elitist, and exclusive.

Everyone in town knows this is happening and no one wants to address the matter because they are all glad it’s not their problem. But it is their problem. 

It is unconscionable that one township has such a school disparity within its borders. Clearly, East Hampton has now become separate and unequal in its treatment of its own students. The students in every hamlet are all East Hampton Town residents, and so this is a townwide problem, not a hamlet problem. Sadly, I believe, it will take a class action lawsuit against the town by a poorer school district in order to get this issue of unfair treatment resolved. Perhaps even busing of students will be mandated by a judge so as to even out the unequal treatment. However, there is a faster and better way to help alleviate some of the problem. 

The current town board could immediately set aside an education fund that receives a transfer of tax dollars equal to $2,500 a student. Instead of squandering any extra tax money on vanity projects, this revenue would now serve a real need. This new education fund would be divvied up at year-end by the total number of students in each school, and a concomitant amount would then be given to each school district on a per capita basis. Have only 40 students in your school system? That gets you only $100,000 in subsidy. But if you have 700 students, you get a $1,750,000 shot in the arm. Doesn ‘t solve the problem of overcrowding just yet, but it does share –the burden of paying for it. And no school district would need to exceed its own tax cap as these funds would be viewed as a grant.

Going forward, the new education fund could be replenished by either a C.P.F. type of dedicated fund stream from properties being sold or, more likely, it could just be supported by a special tax surcharge placed on all properties assessed at $1 million or more. This way, everyone in town pays to educate all of East Hampton’ s students.

Cordially,

DON CIRILLO

Path to Build

Springs

March 28, 2016

Dear David,

One of the largest impediments to the construction of affordable housing is the lack of land on which to build it.

The Land Acquisition and Management Department and the nature preserve committee maintain a list of a couple of hundred town-owned properties that are not community preservation fund purchases or nature preserves or active recreation parks or otherwise already claimed for some specific use. We refer to these as “orphans.” I recently examined the entire list in an attempt to find potential properties that could hold affordable housing beyond a single residential unit. The sad truth is that the town does not own much land that does not have deed restrictions or other reasons that disallow its use for affordable housing.

The town owns the large property in Wainscott, which in the last couple of years had a proposal for a 40-unit affordable project but that the town board is not currently pursuing. There are a few nearby smaller properties in Wainscott that can be used for any general municipal use, which includes affordable housing. There is one difficult-to-develop, moderately sized site in Montauk, and maybe a few smaller properties that could hold duplex to four-plex rental units. Every one of these few parcels is precious and should receive a rezoning for affordable housing.

The town should also determine which privately owned properties would be good candidates for affordable housing and add affordable housing overlays to them. That zoning does not require that affordable housing be built there but it makes the path to build it much simpler and less political. There are several significant properties in this category, and a large amount of affordable housing could someday be created this way. 

Some people, myself included, have suggested that a portion of the community preservation fund revenue be allowed to purchase the land — and land only — for affordable housing projects. This might be helpful for small projects from one to four units since, more and more, the only properties available for purchase by the C.P.F. are single-family lots in environmentally sensitive locations. It would also rebalance the disruption that, more and more, the C.P.F. purchases involve the removal of existing housing stock. The existing C.P.F. law already includes a transfer of development rights clause that could be used for this program. 

If the community preservation fund law allowed, we could try to buy a few of the remaining large parcels in East Hampton and declare some portions of a parcel as open space or recreation and have some of the remaining acres used for affordable housing. But we need the town board — as well as citizens — to lobby Assemblyman Fred W. Thiele Jr. for this change to the community preservation fund law.

If all else fails, we will have to accept that “forever” purchases of open space that we made in the past may no longer be the best use of that land going into the future. In order to truly preserve community character, it might be necessary to look at what open space properties are least important as open space and would best serve the purposes of affordable housing. 

The process of removal from parkland status is careful and laborious, and it requires that all land that is removed be replaced by new open space land. As your editorial of last week suggested, “All potential sources should be considered.”

ZACHARY COHEN

Amagansett Housing 

Amagansett

March 25, 2016

Dear David, 

I write to rebut your headline “Housing Plan Fuels Fears of School ‘Disaster’ ” — or was that irony?

The Amagansett School Board meeting I attended at their invitation to hear an “objective” analysis appeared to me to be catered hypocrisy. The obvious agenda was to stoke taxpayer angst and veiled xenophobia. 

The Amagansett School Board appears to be reacting, negatively, to the possibility of educating a few more children who may live in a proposed work-force housing complex (along with a few barren folk like me). The Amagansett School Board has gone into the chicken-little tax adviser business, ignoring the facts that theirs is among the lowest taxed, richest districts in the state.

I have heard on good authority that on the site of that ugly (albeit historic) little building on the school property there is a proposal for a sterilization clinic.

All good things, 

DIANA WALKER